“‘If we’ve had a pause in upgrades and updates, we’re sorry for that — what happened with the Mac Pro — and we’re going to come out with something great to replace it.’ Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller is talking to a small group of reporters in a white stucco building near its headquarters in Cupertino,” Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch. “The purpose of the discussion, while somewhat unclear initially, reveals itself a few minutes in.”

“The news, if you want it straight: Apple is acknowledging that the Mac Pro they introduced in 2013 has run aground on the cleverness of its own design, and they’re re-thinking the entire machine,” Panzarino reports. “In addition, they’ll be releasing a new external display — something it had previously opted out of. But none of that is coming this year. Today, we’ll see a performance bump on the old design of Mac Pro, which will remain on sale for now. And later this year we’ll see improved iMacs that Apple feels will appeal to a segment of Pro users as well.”

MacDailyNews Take: Clearly, by holding such a rare roundtable with reporters, Apple is now seeing some loss of pro customers, feeling some heat from the media (even from the normally “friendly” Apple-centric media), naturally seeing a drop or pause in Mac Pro sales or some combination of said issues. Apple must now be feeling considerable pain in and from the professional Mac market as they’d normally rather remove their own fingernails with pliers than peel back the curtain to talk with reporters about future Macs while admitting to making major mistakes.

“How it got to this point with the Mac Pro is worth exploring, and in an uncharacteristically (at least on the record) open and frank manner, Schiller, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus do just that,” Panzarino reports. “The context, of course, is that Apple’s dedication to the Mac has taken a bit of a philosophical beating lately among its core professional customers. The narrative is that Apple has not put the resources needed into making the Mac work for pros, has neglected updates…”

“It was the unique triangular design of the Mac Pro’s thermal core that proved to be the limiting factor. Because it was designed to carry roughly balanced loads of heat on all three sides, it just wasn’t equipped to take on the task of supporting the now incredibly popular single massively powerful GPU configuration. Simply put, it wasn’t built for one of the three sides of the triangle to get super hot,” Panzarino reports. “Instead, Apple had placed its bet on the future right smack in the middle of the dual GPU camp — it even designed specific frameworks for developers to handle those twin graphics processors. But that leap to parallel GPUs running in tandem simply never happened en masse.”

Not necessarily. Once you get entrenched in Windows, and there are some real advantages in non-Apple software, cost, availability, quick & less expensive upgrading and options, despite the fact it IS Windows is no guarantee of returning anytime soon to Apple.

This admission is galling. Why are they the last to know?? They would rather wait years to fix it with some yet more self-defeating design cleverness and lose yet more pro’s than simply put out a basic tower as before, something people love in PC Workstations which would require almost no effort.

It’s hard to believe most Windows PC gamers can build more powerful desktops than Apple can even manage.

Motherboards, RAM, CPUs and GPUs, SSDs, etc. all available from off-the-shelf parts. It’s so easy for Windows users and impossible for MacOS users. I don’t need an overclocked desktop with a couple of NVidia GTX 1080ti GPUs in SLI, but it would be nice to have a quad-core i7 desktop with at least one high-end desktop GPU. The Windows faction is leaving Apple in the dust. I know Apple doesn’t care about such things and neither do most Mac users but Apple doesn’t even seem to be trying, at all.

I’m not angry at Apple, but I honestly don’t know what Apple’s thinking. I’m guessing it must have a lot to do with Apple’s ‘greening’ of products. Use the lowest power possible. For every watt Apple saves, the Windows PC guys will continue to use even more.

The reason why no one used dual GPUs was because Apple screwed about with OpenCL, never fixed compiler bugs, the developers were already using CUDA and then to top it off Apple switched from OpenCL to Metal compute.

Apple have pissed the developers off, users have begun switching to PC to get access to high performance nVidia GPUs and CUDA. The 3d community has been lost to Apple and in nearly 2 years time very few of us will give a sh%t about the Mac Pro. However powerful it is it’ll still be way more expensive than an equivalent PC. Those AMD Ryzen CPUs are amazing value and you can get them right NOW!

You speak an “inconvenient truth most here will fail to appreciate, even though I sympathize since I too would rather stay with Macs. Apple couldn’t have been more stupid about their pro market.

Apparently Apple execs have been taking too many siestas and regaling each other with their great investments, travel and fine dining experiences instead of actually working for their customers who depend on them as the ONE (Mac) SOURCE for their pro livelihood. Every division at Apple is important and GODDAMMIT they have the fucking resources to get it right!!

I have no intention of waiting any longer though, my patience at an end. My God do they appreciate how badly they have mangled this market? Did it have to get down to sales dropping to record lows for them to realize? This admission should’ve come a year ago. Major FAIL. We have come to expect better from Apple and don’t expect them to be asleep at the switch.

Stick with the cheese grater, drop it to one-third the former size, offer nano-blades incorporating either ARM chips or AMD’s new chips, make daisy chaining the mini-cheese graters easy so power hungry users can create their own super computer by spending a little more cash.

Do we laugh or cry in a sort of manic way at this admission. I also note that they also said ‘we have been told by Pros that a touch interface is not amongst the priorities they are looking for’. They may well be right its just the fact that SJ used to give us stuff that we didn’t know we needed till we had it, so is this the first admission that the company no longer actually knows where it is going (or wants to go) and has to ask its customers? In other words totally reactive and safe rather than innovative and proactive. It would fit all the visible signs wouldn’t it. Though if that is now the road ahead (the Microsoft of old) at least update the damn stuff we are stuck with guys.

It is disturbing that it took Apple 3 full years to even think about backtracking and publicly admitting their Mac Pro mistake. And almost as disturbing that it’ll be maybe another year from this point before we see a new machine.

Yes it takes awhile to “get it right”, and Apple ain’t a traditional PC boxmaker where they can just slap together parts. But by the same token, a pro tower is NOT that complex a deal; the G3 and G4 PowerMacs were great examples of easy expandability. So, another whole year (they’ve presumably been working on it for at least a few months already) suggests they’re overthinking it for the sake of hardware uniqueness.

Yeah, they did screw up. They got too big for their britches and may still be too big for them. Why it takes them a year to come up with a box is beyond me.

Put a small team on it and tell them to come up with something in four months that kicks butt. Burn the midnight oil. You have all the pieces APPLE, like the one fellow said, the AMD chips are available now and they are cheap.

Think of offering several models, maybe an experimental model running ARM chips. Why not? Test the concept. It comes with a warning to buyers, “It’s the X Model.” Let the market help you work through the problems. The same way you did with AppleTV, SIRI, etc. Except maybe this time point out that it is the “X” model and anyone buying it will be to an extent working on the bleeding edge. Keep the price super low because of the ARM chips. A segment of buyers would love the challenge.

blades – 6-12 core, 16-32gb, 1tb storage, 3x5x.5 dimension. You make ’em for ~$75 and sell ’em for ~$250. Allowing users to spend enough money so they can get their personal desktop machine into the top 500. https://www.top500.org